Paulius Musteikis
In her studio near Monona Bay, Donna Page helps restore ancient art to its original glory.
In a studio near the shores of Monona Bay, Donna Page sits back and studies several thousand years of history sitting on her bookshelf.
A mix of personal possessions and pieces sent to her from around the country for repair and restoration, the lineup more or less dictates Page’s agenda for the day. A 2,000-year-old terracotta head from Nigeria and an encrusted wood samana mask from Mali (she asks me to point out the spot she’d repaired, but the surface betrays no breaks or irregularities) will be sent back to their owners shortly. She turns her attention to the work at hand, a wood figure from the Baule culture of the Ivory Coast sitting on her desk.
“It’s like a rotating museum in here, and I appreciate that because I love looking at pieces,” Page says. “You never know quite what’s going to turn up.”
A distinct smell — a combination of art supply store, museum and archeological site — permeates the air in the studio, a former liquor store that Page purchased, gutted and repurposed as both her work and living space. A native of Green Bay, Page returned to Wisconsin in late 2007 after a nearly 30-year career in New York studying and restoring African art, with a focus in wood and terracotta sculpture.
Many of her clients, primarily dealers, collectors and museums scattered across the U.S., stayed with her after her move, and Page still relies entirely on word of mouth — no website, no advertising — to expand her business. After nearly eight years in the building, she still hasn’t had any encounters with her neighbors about her work.
“I think they go by the window and wonder, ‘What’s going on in here?’” she says with a laugh.
In order to stay true to a piece’s cultural origin, Page relies on her extensive knowledge and collection of indigenous materials that she’s accrued over the years. Dozens of jars of these materials, including clays, dyes and pigments brought to her from around the world, populate almost every flat surface of the studio. Depending on the work that’s needed, Page can combine various materials to re-create more or less every shade and texture applied to the piece at its making.
Today, Page is using kaolin, a soft white clay that is an ingredient in china and porcelain, combined with darker pigments, to restore the surface of the Baule figure, the female of a pair referred to in the culture as “asie usu,” or spirit spouses. Her original finish had been polished off, and the owner wanted her appearance to match the more authentic shades of the male figure.
Page mixes the clay and pigments with a small brush, blending and adding ingredients to darken and lighten as needed. Holding the figure on her lap almost as if in an embrace, she paints and dabs deliberately over the surface, rotating slowly until the figure is fully coated. She works steadily and, most of all, patiently. “When you mix the pigment, you kind of have to guesstimate, and then try it out, let it dry, and then try it again,” she says. A hair dryer helps speed up the process, as the exact color will have to be achieved in layers.
When she’s restoring a piece, Page says she often feels like she’s retracing the path of the original artist.
“You almost get into the mind of the person that made it in the first place, and I really like that process,” she says. With that, she turns back to her work, preserving the past to ensure its future.
Oldest piece in Donna Page’s collection:
A small piece of pottery from Sudan, circa the Neolithic period and approximately 3,000 years old.
Books she’s co-authored:
Surfaces: Color, Substances, and Ritual Applications on African Sculpture (2009) and African Art in African American Collections (2015), which will have an accompanying exhibition at Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History in April.
Education:
Earned her MFA at UW-Madison and taught basic design and ceramics at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Ill., Drew University in Madison, N.J., and Queensborough College-CUNY in Bayside, N.Y.
